Handheld devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones have entered the market successfully in North America and overseas. These carrier-based solutions are constantly expanding to include more features that deliver useful content (news, entertainment, and data) to the user. Unfortunately, carrier based systems are bogged down by high traffic and low data transfer rates and furthermore are billed at extremely high rates. Though in some cases they provide real-time delivery of content, the average user does not always require this. The average user who does not need real-time content delivery (such as real time delivery of email) currently does not have the ability to scale down the carrier-based services and is therefore stuck paying expensive recurring service bills along with the one-time cost of their device.
The proposed invention describes a distributed network comprised of nodes equipped with wireless transceivers. The distributed network itself may be formed by connecting each node to the internet or any other existing or new network infrastructure such that the terminals are able to transmit data to and from each other as the existing nodes presently do. The wireless transceivers on each network node expand the range of the newly formed network to wireless devices in the physical coverage area. Therefore, a wireless connection is provided for any wireless-equipped device within the physical range of a terminal to connect to the network. Using this type of network between terminals allows rapid content delivery or reception to and from any device equipped with the required wireless connectivity hardware.
Content delivery is performed at “terminal” locations without the need of physically connecting a wire to the network. The client devices are also equipped with wireless connectivity hardware communicate with the distributed network via the wireless connection (when physically in range). Conversely, the user may transmit data wirelessly to the terminal for use anywhere on the wired network or storage.